"...Fear makes a false friend indeed..."

"Formation" by A'Driane Nieves

Dear friends. If you aren't already following A'Driane Nieves, you should absolutely do so now. The above painting stopped me in my tracks and her words are just as striking and important. She recently launched Create Resistance Collaborative, a collaborative of WOC multidisciplinary artists creating and utilizing art for advocacy, protest and social change which you can follow, here. Addye's artwork is available for sale, here and she also has a newsletter. 

And speaking of Instagram, for which I am more grateful than ever because ART IS HUMANITY'S CONNECTIVE TISSUE, I was DM'd the following video which has served as a salve as much as it's pissed me off, which I think is kind of the point right now. We need to get angry. We need to cry.  We need to sing. We need to listen...

"Angry?
Am I angry?
You ask am I angry?
And I'm at a loss for words..."

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Thank you, Sara Bareilles and Leslie Odem Jr. And thank you, Alicia for sharing it with me.

This song is currently available for free download, here.

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I also wanted to share this incredible (and hopeful!) must-read piece by Baratunde Thurston. If you haven't yet read it, please do. And if you've already read it, read it again. 

...Had Hillary Clinton won, many of us would have moved on as if all was right with the world, but the world is very wrong, and the impact of that wrongness is on display for all to see. This is an opportunity to dig deeper into our imaginations and collective intelligence for solutions, to make great art, to forge stronger human connections, to plant deeper community roots, to try to listen to each other.

We develop a new story. We have repeated and fed off the American myth for too long after it stopped bearing any resemblance to the truth for too many. All the forces that unleashed this most recent backlash are still at play. The future is only coming at us faster, and it will not wait for us to get our shit together. You think self-driving cars will make this better? You think the Martian colony will save us from the problems of Earth? You think SkyNet will be any easier to defeat, divided and conquerable as we are right now? No, this all gets harder.

That old story we told ourselves — that hard work and a 9-to-5 and a private home and car and grotesque amounts of natural resource consumption and the privatization of public space and the ignoring of history would deliver the American dream — is dead.

We need a new story that starts with who and where we are now and defines where we want to go. A story that includes the immigrant, the incarcerated, the evangelical, and the engineer. A story that redefines what success means for a nation founded imperfectly on near-perfect ideals. A story that encourages us to see sacrifice for each other as gain for us all.

And we must allow ourselves to feel the agony and exhaustion and despondency of this transition. To paraphrase a past president violently taken from us at another low point in our history, we need to do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard. Like that high road, it’s the difficulty that makes them worth doing.

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Let's keep doing.
And doing.
And doing...